Boral survives strike threat, inflation persists
Cement and asphalt group Boral, which has been pressured by some investment funds after dialling back its 2025 carbon emissions targets, averted a strike at its annual meeting on Thursday.
Proxies cast against the remuneration report reached 10.2 per cent, short of the 25 per cent threshold for a first strike.
Boral chairman Ryan Stokes. Louie Douvis
Chairman Ryan Stokes said the federal government needed to move quickly to implement a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism scheme to help Australian cement makers compete with imports on a level playing field. A CBAM scheme, similar to schemes operating in Europe, would help stop carbon emissions simply being transferred to cement manufacturers in Asia which operated under less stringent environmental rules, he said.
“Without it, local industry will be significantly disadvantaged through relatively higher production costs, effectively moving manufacturing and carbon emissions offshore, contributing to carbon leakage,” Mr Stokes told the meeting.
Boral’s Berrima cement plant near Bowral in NSW is one of the 215 facilities captured under the federal government’s safeguard mechanism, which seeks to steadily lower the emissions of the largest carbon emitters by 2030.
Boral chief executive Vik Bansal, who took the helm a year ago, said trading was in line with expectations as he reaffirmed full-year forecasts of underlying earnings before interest and tax of between $270 million and $300 million. But he warned that even though inflation had slowed, it was not reversing, and cost pressures were still substantial.
“We are not in a deflationary environment. This means the cost increases faced by our business are not going backwards,” he said.
Official data on Wednesday showed that
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